Tackling inequality with one mind
Today marks the end of the international 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children. It’s also International Human Rights Day. Head of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, spoke to Janet Smith about the powerful aims of her organisation i
IT’S A useful barometer to start with how different our position is now to when the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were drawn up. We didn’t have UN Women then, although there were aspects of the work we do in different parts of the UN.
Make no mistake. The MDGs contributed. They indeed did focus on women and girls’ equality. But they didn’t go far enough. Sure, they looked at women’s participation in leadership, and at girls’ education, but that was not enough and not as explicit as we would have liked it to be.
Fifteen years later, we were more ready for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). UN Women has existed in that space from day one, and UN Women was able to devote time, energy and resources to track every moment of those negotiations.
Where it was once just a secretariat in theory, we were now able to support or question positions in those negotiations, and we spoke to like-minded groups of people who helped to strengthen our arguments.
Where there were those who continued to agree with different positions to ours, we could try to win them over. And I really take my hat off to civil society, which sent reinforcements out of every continent. Those kinds of affiliates were very active. They played their roles in real time with information and support.
The negotiations for the MDGs were different. It was a very inclusive process. For the SDGs, we had nations, civil society and the private sector all involved. We needed allies who would stand with us.
This meant everyone who had an issue could present it and see those issues reflected. We focused on people. We didn’t want to leave anyone behind.
There’s no Planet B, so we have to share the prosperity on this one.
We’re asking countries to address the manner in which economies are run. We want, in particular, to see how poverty and underdevelopment have affected gender equality through different kinds of economies.
For example, on the issue of migrants, we believe the background is that prosperity is not being shared, and unless we share prosperity, we won’t have peace.
That became a very important part of the SDGs.
When you really concentrate on what “universal” means, you have to acknowledge that gender represents this.
But it is shocking to realise that no country in the world has achieved gender equality. Not one.
So our target is a complex challenge in every respect.
We’re all about Goal Five. People can remember it by high five. This focuses on women, on substantive barriers to gender equality, on stereotypes, and what the world is going to include in its considerations around policy, economies and so on. There’s a lot of work that has to be done as so many countries still have laws which discriminate against women.
Even issues like trafficking and cyber bullying, these are gender issues. Some women and girls experience a whole lot of discrimination all at once.
Violence against women in conflict areas is a massive concern. We’ve seen that with Islamic State, for instance. This is part of its military doctrine – to deny girls education, to sexually enslave women.
This is a critical part of what we’re fighting against when we talk about universal equality.
It’s important in that sense to look at what some countries have done to try to undo the damages of the past – Rwanda, for instance. But we have to be careful not to make assumptions. Iceland, for instance, doesn’t have the kind of indicators you might imagine; Yemen, everybody has work to do.
Sexual rights and reproductive rights are crucial. Where women are denied the right to family planning, this is a major blow to gender equality.
Unpaid care work is going to be a long and hard battle, because that, too, can be a barrier to full empowerment and has to be reduced, if not eliminated entirely.
The other enormous part of our work is to follow up on interventions and programmes. Something like paternity laws is vital because that speaks to equal parenting, which, in turn, is about drawing nearer to gender equality. We are looking at how women can be discriminated against when they are pregnant or have children. The International Labour Organisation calls this “the motherhood penalty”.
Meanwhile, 30 to 70 percent of women are earning less in some middle-income countries. Unequal pay is a problem, especially where there is a discrepancy in maternity privileges.
Even pension schemes sometimes discriminate against women. Women are passed up for promotion.
We’ve included and are looking at all of this, not only ending obviously harmful practices like child marriage. Quite simply, affordable childcare, for instance, would change millions of women’s lives.
What’s made the greatest change for us over the past 15 years has been how much access we now have to numbers and statistics. Compared to when the MDGs were drawn up, this is quite substantive.
That knowledge has meant the SDGs represent the most comprehensive agreement that nations of the world have signed since World War II.
The implementation promises to be much more effective after our experience of Beijing+20. It’s one thing to get a good agreement and another to take advantage of it. I’ve made it my business to engage with governments one by one, to create opportunities for leaders to get together on these subjects. The coming 15 years are going to be different.
In September, we convened an exclusive heads of state summit for the first time. We got 70 heads of state to participate in a dialogue, and we found the biggest issue was violence against women.
16 Days represents a truly global problem – a concern to all, no matter whether they are in rich or underdeveloped countries. We recognise violence against women and girls as such a huge barrier to bringing about change.
It’s no use standing on a platform and speaking about it, and then that’s where it ends. We have to think: collaboration.
We have to draw in academic institutions and the private sector. We need a co-ordinated approach. We need legislation. We need law enforcers who are on the same side. We need zero tolerance and no mixed messages.
We need boys and men to take a stand. As soon as you have them on board, you’re making progress.
We haven’t reached the point of critical reasoning yet, but we are inching to it.
Data collection allows us to see evidence of patterns good and bad, what’s worked, what’s not worked. Even while we’re pinpointing progress, we must see how uneven this has been. When you look at leadership stats, for example, you’ll see that only about 20 countries in the world have had woman heads of state, and only 22 percent of women are MPs.
That’s an improvement, by the way. In 1995, it was only 11 percent.
But we don’t want to trivialise any of this. It suggests a way forward. We need to keep working on governments and heads of state to expand the budgets for their women’s ministries, for instance. That’s where we could work together.
But we’ve got to be strategic and focus on structural change. We can’t have one or two shareholders aiming to do this. It’s when we collaborate that there’ll be a shake-up, and we’ll gain traction.
Social media, mass communication – these will help. But the bottom line is that we must tackle this challenge with one mind.